I'm ready. It's roll 10091, it is the 28th of January 1996 and this is an interview with Professor Edouard Goldstucker.

Professor Goldstucker I would like to ask you to cast back your mind to the early fifties, and at that time can you tell me what position you actually had in 1951?

A:

In 1951 I finished my stay in Tel Aviv as First Czechoslovak Ambassador to Israel, and I was appointed Czechoslovak Diplomatic Representative to Sweden, and I came from Tel Aviv where I wound up my stay there to Prague to get acquainted with the new duties, and to continue my journey to Stockholm. But I was kept back in Prague under various pretences, and my stay being prolonged all the time, until half a year later I was officially told that my old request to leave the diplomatic service was granted, and that Politbureau decided that I should leave the diplomatic service and become Professor of German literature at the University. And I started teaching at the university, still as a formal employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and after a few weeks, three, four weeks I was suddenly arrested. Because that was the time when the most brutal show trial of the whole Soviet Empire was being organised, and I was drawn into it.

Q:

Why were you arrested and how did you feel. Was it a kind of total surprise to you that you:

A:

Oh it was more than a total surprise it was:

Q:

Could I ask you just to start after I have finished?

A:

Yes. I was arrested in December 1951 and it was:

Q:

Could I just ask you to start again, thank you?

A:

I was arrested in December 1951 and it was not only a surprise, but a traumatic experience, to find oneself suddenly to be on a list of people who were thrown overboard. By somebody, by a state, or a party, to which one was absolutely loyal. I don't know whether anybody can, who did not live through such an experience, can feel what it meant. And I was taken to the prison of the Secret Police, at Prague near the airport, and kept there for a year and a half, in total isolation, questioned all the time.

Q:

What did you actually think when you were arrested, and were you given an official explanation to what was actually going on?

A:

No of course not. When I was arrested, and taken immediately to the head of the questioning team, I asked. The first question was, I asked why I was arrested, and the answer was a smile, an ironic smile, and said that is to, that is what you will tell us and not we tell you. Because they said we haven't got the time you are not here for a week, or a month, or a year, and you will tell us.

Q:

One of the things you, I would like to ask you, just very briefly to describe, where were you arrested. How did this whole event:

A:

Well as I said I came I came back to Prague from Israel, and I had no apartment in Prague. So my wife is out, two small children, went to see her mother in a provincial town. Her mother lived there in a one roomed flat, with one little kitchen, and I lived in hotels in Prague, and I was arrested in one of the great Prague hotels, in December 51.

Q:

What were you charged with?

A:

Oh eventually when I was brought to the Supreme Court, a year and a half after my arrest, I was charged with high treason, espionage, conspiracy to subverse the constitution. I was charged on two counts which according to the law of the time carried the death sentence. And I had a defence attorney, because that somebody was accused of such heavy crimes, the law prescribed the necessity of having an attorney. And the attorney was chosen That attorney came to see me in prison, in the presence of the Secret Police officer. He talked to me for about a quarter of an hour, gave me one single legal advice, not to use dirty words in front of the high, of the Supreme Court. And then when it came to the crunch and he got up to defend me, he started his plea with a sentence which I never forget, "For my client the Supreme punishment is being demanded, and there is no doubt that he deserves it". Then he appealed to the court that as I was not a leader of the conspiracy, that they should take that into account. My trial, went on from nine o'clock in the morning to four o'clock in the afternoon, and at four o'clock, after this plea, and demand of death sentence, the Supreme Court decided to retire to discuss the sentence which they had ready made for them, and sent from the Party already, and to announce the decision, the verdict, next day at nine o'clock. So that between, about at four o'clock in the afternoon, and nine o'clock next morning I had to come to terms with the probability of being sentenced to death and hanged within a week.

Q:

What kind of feeling was that?

A:

Well, I must say it was a very, very unrepeatable mixed feeling. Because the main problem in my head was to finish that questioning and that isolation of eighteen months, for any price, even the price of life. That was the main consideration, and I, in that night really came to terms with the idea of dying, of death, and I think that ever since then I do not feel any dread of the end of my life. So that was good for something. But next morning I was sentenced only to life imprisonment, with the loss of property and all that.

Q:

You said you were, it was part of a conspiracy. Could you say how your arrest and your interrogation was actually linked to the Slansky trial?

A:

Of course it was linked to the Slansky trial. I was arrested immediately after Slansky.'s arrest, I think within three weeks after his arrest, and I was linked directly to the Slansky trial, to the so-called Slansky conspiracy which was fabricated of course. They, they needed to pin on Slansky the accusation of espionage, the indictment of espionage. And that espionage with somebody in the West, and the person chosen for that role in the West was the then Labour member of Parliament and as I knew, I was diplomatic representative, Czechoslovakia in London, and I knew Slansky so they needed me as the connecting actor, or the connecting, well what? Lynch-pin, in that so-called espionage. And that is why I was connected with the Slansky trial. At the beginning it was so that I would be co-defendant with Slansky. But at the end they decided differently and I think the reason of that decision was that with Slansky. The ex-General Secretary of the Communist Party, co-defendants must be only those who reached a certain degree of social or political, and the lowest degree deemed fit to be accused with Slansky were vice ministers. And I was only an ambassador. So I was kept apart, and put before the Supreme Court half a year later, as the head of a new group of conspirators, for I was lucky in that, because between the Slansky trial and my own, in that half a year, Stalin and GOTTWALD died. Had they been alive at the time of my trial, I would have with all probability, more than probability, I would have been sentenced to death, and hanged.